The darkness in the clouds contrasts against the white of the snow-capped peak, while the yellows of the fall foliage jump out from the evergreens. Everything is balanced in this photo.

This version is whitewashed. The blacks are nonexistent and the colors are muted throughout the image. This is pretty common among influencers and but it’s a bad photo.

This lesson teaches the concept of adjusting the light in various ways, such as adding more orange or darkening the highlights. Because I use Adobe Lightroom, I’ll be using the same vocabulary they do. Other apps may use different words, but the ideas are generally still the same. This lesson will be a little longer due to the variety of options in editing photos, but there’s one thing to remember above all else: keep it simple!

The most important takeaway from this lesson is that we’re mostly editing photos to compensate for hardware deficiencies in cameras or lenses. The goal here is to create a photo that’s accurately representative of the natural scene. The two most common mistakes are adding way too much color or removing way too much color. The first example photo is well-balanced and presents a beautiful scene of shoulder season in Colorado. Two bad edits are beneath it, followed by the original shot right and a preliminary adjustment.

This version is over saturated. The whites are nonexistent. Even though the blues and yellows are extremely obvious, there’s nothing else for contrast. A good photo needs a full range of light.

The original photo shows off the weaknesses of the camera and lens used to take the shot: Sony a6400 with a basic 16-50mm lens. Black levels were always an issue on the camera and the default color profile usually emphasizes orange and red while other colors fall a little flat. I used a few different tools to adjust the blacks: black level, shadows, and dehaze. By also increasing the whites, the contrast is larger. The left version is completely untouched. The right version has some adjustments to blacks, whites, and the contrast but no changes have been made to the colors yet.